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The beast shrugs off the monk's assault. The blows cause welts and bruises to immediately appear on its flanks, but it is still up on its many feet.

At the start of any of your turns you need to specify that you are "averting your gaze", meaning looking anywhere but directly at the basilisk. This state is pretty much the same as being BLINDED but only towards the one target. This state lasts until the start of your next turn where you should/could specify that you are again averting your gaze.

Attack the basilisk, and if I hit use Maneuvering Strike. I just want the extra damage, so whoever wants to move half their speed chime in and you can have it.
Geth, roll 1d20+5 for Attack!
Geth, roll 1d8+3 for Damage!
Geth, roll 1d8 for Maneuver!

You can't hit what you can't see, and you can't see what you can't look at, but you might hit what you can't look at. Look, there's a reason why most halfling achievements are measured in pipeweed potency and ME/D (meals eaten per day). Not all civilizations are ripe breeding grounds for great philosophers.

Barran narrows his eyes, waggles his fingers, and mutters a few mystic phrases. A large, ornate helmet complete with feathery plume and a eye shield appears in the air around the basilisk's head, neatly concealing its features from anyone else. Barran focuses his concentration on making sure to keep his illusion centered on the beast's head as it moves about the room, preventing the creature from making eye contact with any more of the party.

"Don't try to pierce the illusion!" he cries, "it's keeping you safe!"

Action: Cast Silent Image
Move: back off to give the fighters more room

Steelhawk and I discussed this, and as long as Barran's able to maintain concentration and spend his actions on keeping the illusion in the proper place around the basilisk's head it should be enough to block the start of petrification (sorry, Dural) while letting you attack it without looking away.

If you really want to see through the illusion, it's a DC 12 Int (investigation) check, and attempting to hit the illusion will make it obvious that it's not really there and you'll instantly be able to see past it.

The Basilisk roars and stamps its feet, shaking its head from side to side. A bead of sweat appears on Barran's brow as he is doing his best to keep the helmet in place through all of the beasts movements.

It's working.

It really is. It was not a hard sell at all.

I assume that the helmet does not cover the mouth of the beast? Otherwise it would be biting the shit out of it right now and ruining your idea.

Dural's a bit preoccupied at the moment to notice much about what's going on around the basilisk's face. His feet feel like lead weights attached to hunks of iron and have stopped responding to his will. Worse, that feeling has very quickly started to progress up from his feet and legs to spreading out throughout the rest of his body. Still, he has a job to do: killing a very ornery lizard. He might not be able to move, but the lizard hasn't either! With what little movement remains in his arms he reaches over and attempts one more swing at the furious lizard, hammer swinging briefly through the air before smashing against the creature's hide; whether or not it damaged it to any significant degree, Dural will stop and find out later.

For now, the dwarf's energies are focused on not turning to stone. I be born beneath rock, surrounded by rock, he thinks to himself, Finder, don't let me return to th'rock in such literal a sense. Exhaling, he closes his eyes and focuses his inward grumpiness to shoving out whatever unnatural perversion makes up this lizard's magic. I am a dwarf! his mind yells inwardly. I will my feet forward, not some peabrained, multilimbed aberration of a lizard. I AM A DWARF!

Precious moments tick by in stern concentration until finally, suddenly, a metal boot slides on stone floor, only briefly, but enough to cause Dural to open his eyes in triumph. He then immediately looks at Philo with a surprisingly serious look, stating simply: "Hands off m'beer."

When the creature falls, Dural's hammer remains hefted as if not trusting that the devious creature isn't in fact dead. Prodding its corpse to confirm for himself, he then relaxes slightly before immediately starting to assemble an impromptu campfire right alongside the Basilisk's flank. Three torches are arranged in a pile of whatever random detritus he can otherwise scrounge up from around the room, neatly and carefully and precise. Then, the dwarf takes a few good moments to remove his worn, metal-soled boots that had just recently been trying to turn to stone...and adds them to the centre of the campfire.

Retrieving a tinderbox and flint from his bag, he strikes once, twice, and one final time until the torches catch fire and the campfire is burning, his boots along with it. "An offering of travels, iron, and predators slain," Dural speaks, head bowed in front of the fire, "As thanks fer the Finder's path remainin' illuminated in front of me, hopefully for some time t'come." He'll remain head bowed in prayer for some time or until spurred on by the others, his hairy toes wiggling idly now and again.

Barran wipes his brow and puffs out a heavy sigh when the beast hit the floor, sending the "helmet" bizarrely through the stone for a moment before he releases his spell and the image blinks out.

"I really have to wonder how they wrangled this beast in here in the first place," he says, but then notices the variety of goblinoid statues in various states of damage around the room. "On the plus side, the room we snuck into before is probably empty. Care for another peek, Ay?"

Barran gives Dural some time to attend to his prayers, taking the opportunity to boot the Hobgoblin corpse by the door so that its arm drops away from the activation rune. The irregular drone of rushing electricity from the hallway falls silent.

That is more than good enough for what I want to convey...and appropriate that the tactician of the group made the roll.

The disappearance of the frightening animated suits of armor...the dead man's switch on the statue trap...releasing the Basilisk from its room...It's clear to Philo that Lady Zarr is getting nervous now.

She has pulled back and consolidated her defenses. Her usual horde is far away make their delivery of slaves in the Underdark. The fodder she had left at her disposal has been devastated: The loss of one of her Captains and his men while trying to loot the Bone Throne, the troops holding the main entrance, another gang of her fodder while they where learning to get along and even more as they ate their lunch, freeing her personal chef, the slaying of her family of pet spiders and the loss of one of her fellow Dark Elves as well as his hunting party...

If there ever was a time to lop the head off of these Drow slavers, now is the time!!!

"Right lads," says Philo, slipping back into his command voice. "Unless I miss my guess, Lady Zarr is scrambling. Dead hobs, dead spiders, her food source hobbled since we freed Neblin..." He frowns, twisting his hand on the hilt of his sword. Here were all of the threads coming together, the little pieces of information that a good soldier and a good battle-captain picked up in the field - the likely strength of the enemy based on how many were at the front, their morale and cohesion, their supply lines and storage - no one of it enough to draw a firm conclusion from, and the final picture itself murky, but that and your instincts were the only things to go on. So you made your call, and you barked to the men to get moving, clapped some shoulders and told some old marching jokes, and either you were right and you won or you were wrong and you died.

Except these aren't your soldiers, he reminds himself. "I think," he says, letting the command-voice slip away, "that we won't have a better chance than now to get to the heart of Zarr's lair and put an end to her slaving, for good. I propose we move on her lair with all speed." He glances at Ay and grins. "Well, maybe not all of us at all speed. You wouldn't want to go in twenty marks before the rest of us, Ay."

Philo sketches a map of the dungeon in the dust. "Here's what we know," he says, quickly rattling off the chambers they've been through and what they killed there. "We have two routes into Zarr's lair: from above, and from below. Above was the kitchens, and clear the last time we saw it; below was the barracks, and we've no idea what's down there." He scratches his chin. "If I'm right about Zarr's situation, and if I were in that situation myself, I would have pulled back to a smaller perimeter, perhaps as small as this." He points to rooms 15,17, and 18. "Either approach, then, should be open for us. If she has the strength she'll have pickets posted, so we'll want to take the hardest-to-watch route. That looks to be the southernmost path," he traces the hallways from the southernmost room 9 over to room 18. "Striking that way, with careful scouting by the indomitable Barran, should give us a sense of if she has more forces than I guess, and hopefully allow us to enter her base unannounced. It'll be sword-work once we're in, but none of us are strangers to that." He looks around at the rest of the party. "We can put an end to this, gentlemen. Your thoughts on the plan?"

Salazar finishes cutting through the final bits of flesh and jolts the jaw out of its socket.
He then start burning off the flesh, eating bits of it here and there.
As he's doing so he'll squint at the map and listen to Philo's tactical suggestions.

Barran pokes at Room 5. "That's the room Ay and I scouted out before, where we first saw the... well, a giant lizard that resembles the one we just defeated. I'd like to take another peek in there, if not to see if there's anything valuable resembling a hoard inside then just to confirm that we don't have to worry about another one of those creatures sneaking up on us from behind as we head further in."

Barran pokes at Room 5. "That's the room Ay and I scouted out before, where we first saw the... well, a giant lizard that resembles the one we just defeated. I'd like to take another peek in there, if not to see if there's anything valuable resembling a hoard inside then just to confirm that we don't have to worry about another one of those creatures sneaking up on us from behind as we head further in."

The room looks exactly the same as before. The statues and old mural and half eaten people-statues.

It's a large room, a dark room, and there are plenty of places where items of value could be stashed...

Ay nods and follows Barran into the room. "If anything, maybe we can figure out more about her defenses." Ay looks about with Barran, trying to either find out more information about Lady Zarr and her lair, or what the creature may have been guarding.

And if there isn't any obvious danger in the room, Ay will move into the room to explore/examine things better. Won't run in, but passive perception style looking around to make sure I don't step on a trap or anything, too.